Last Friday, I attended Bill Draper’s first annual Blockchain Connect conference in San Francisco and I have to say that it was AWESOME. Easily the best blockchain based conference I have attended over the years. Andy Tang did a great job of bringing in speakers that had a unique perspective and different level of expertise to the discussion. Some of the more notable speakers were: Charlie Lee (creator of Litecoin), Brad Garlinghouse (CEO of Ripple), Tim Draper, Todd Chaffee (General Partner of IVP), Kavita Gupta (Founding Managing Partner of Consensys Capital), Andy Tang (Managing Partner of Draper Dragon), etc. Below I have listed 20 key takeaways from the conference:
- Japanese government approves all digital currencies before they are listed on any exchange
- Only 3% of the digital currencies that apply to Binance get listed
- The digital currency space lacks basic infrastructure for mass adoption
- The bubble will not pop until the institutions coming into the space now, unload their profits onto mainstream retail. However, the sophisticated capital coming in now will fund high-quality projects, this will help the market naturally filter out the garbage
- The first big step towards mainstream adoption will be with large enterprises. For example, if apple wallet had the capabilities to support cryptocurrency, this would automatically make it accessible to every single iPhone holder
- Top banks are skeptical about cryptocurrencies because they lack the basic understanding of the technology
- Saying you believe in blockchain but not cryptocurrencies, is like saying you believe in tcp but the internet
- US regulators will not shut down cryptocurrency exchanges, but they are trying to accomplish three things: make people pay taxes, don’t want people getting scammed, and want to control certain aspects of the money supply. The only solution they have come up with so far has been to regulate the fiat to cryptocurrency onramps.
- Everyone thinks Tron is a complete joke
- Surge in ripple price is linked to Korean proclivity for the currency
- No formal valuation model used by VC or anyone for investment in tokens
- Currently, proof of work dominates the consensus market
- 2018 could be the year of the POS coins (incentive based), however, POW is the most secure (mathematically based)
- Saying you don’t want privacy coins because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t want free speech because you have nothing to say
- “Ripple has one use-case and that’s cross-border payments.” Brad Garlinghouse
- Decentralized exchanges are the future
- Would like to see ICOs utilize vesting schedules and raise money in different stages
- Banks will eventually sell Bitcoin
- Privacy is a huge area of interest for VC
- The issue of scalability is a big problem that the protocols are trying to work through
Digital currencies took a huge step forward in 2017 and are continuing its progress in 2018. Overall, the market has been very bearish for digital currency investors, however, the market is beginning to filter out the bad actors which is a huge overall positive for the space.
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www.masidigitalventures.com